“Discerning signs has to do with comprehending the remarkable in common happenings, with perceiving the saga of salvation within the era of the Fall. It has to do with the ability to interpret ordinary events in both apocalyptic and eschatological connotations, to see portents of death where others find progress or success but, simultaneously, to behold tokens of the reality of the Resurrection or hope where others are consigned to confusion or despair.”

…what we call the secular is actually the realm or domain of the Spirit. The secular – literally meaning the world, the realm outside of church control – isn’t profane. Rather, properly understood, it is sacred because the Spirirt is and always has been active there, evoking light from darkness, order from chaos,fullness from void, life from lifelessness…

If the secular is sacred, that means that the Spirit is at work in what we call secular work in the secular world… So the scientist studying interstellar dust is investigating the domain of the Spirit, and the Spirit gently ‘hovers’ over her neurons as they fire a hypothesis into being. The same is true of a paleontologist excavating a fossil, an executive developing a marketing plan, a stonemason fashioning a chimney, a father changing a [nappy], a mother planning a vacation, an engineer designing a solar panel and a bookkeeper wrestling with a budget. And that’s as true for a Muslim astronomer, a Buddhist paleontologist, a Sikh executive, a Hindu stonemason, a Jewish father, a Jain mother and an arheist engineer as it is for a Christian theologian. What may differ is not the presence and benevolence of the Spirit, but the awareness and responsiveness of the individual.

From Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road?, p141